Famous Writers I Have Known

by James Magnuson

  “Right. But there was some other stuff too. More expensive stuff.”

  I had the woman back on her heels. She turned to rinse her hands in the sink, to hide her face from me. It might seem as if I was a genius, but, honestly, it’s not that hard. What five-hundred-dollar-a-week cook isn’t going to be stealing from her eighty-five-year-old employer?

  “I think he said something about some of the gifts from his trips . . .”

  Even though she was turned away from me, I could see her flinch as if someone had poked her in the ribs with a stick. She wheeled around, her face pale.

  “You mean those Japanese boxes?”

  “I think, yeah, I think that’s what he said.”

  “I never touch those things! I promise you. He loses things all the time. He accuses me of stealing his socks.”

  “I’m not saying that any of this is true, but I just thought I should warn you. And in case they get a search warrant, I don’t think you want any of this stuff lying around the house.” I patted the stack of letters and documents.

  “So what am I going to do?”

  “First of all, I think we need to have another drink,” I said.

  We sat and drank for a couple of hours. I’d put the fear of God in her. For the moment at least, any thoughts of selling Rex’s story to Oprah was out the window. All she was worried about now was how to keep from being thrown out of the country.

  She was furious that Rex had been spying on her. “What is this, Russia? Who could live like this, with him watching like an old buzzard from a tree? So maybe I take a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet once in a while. I supposed to go to prison for that? This is a man who throw a baby to the dogs. Nobody ever do anything to him for that.”

  From time to time she got up to finish her cooking, transferring everything to a casserole dish, adding potatoes, sliced peppers, and tomatoes, and finally sticking it all in the oven. She was kind of a nice woman, once you got to know her. A little crooked, but so was I. I may have mentioned how hatchet-faced she was, but I could see where she could have almost been pretty when she was young.

  It wasn’t long before she was pleading with me to take the packet of letters off her hands. She matched me shot for shot, getting more and more worked up. At her age, how was she ever going to get a job after this?

  By the time we finished the bottle of plum brandy, she was resting her head in the crook of her arm. “This is the end. There is no hope. What can I do? I have no one to help me.”

  I patted her hand. “I will help you, Dranka.”

  “You? You’re just a writer, how can you help?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “But we’ll come up with something.”

  I walked her to her room, laid her down on the bed, and closed the door softly as I left. I straightened all the papers on the kitchen table and jammed them back in the mailing envelope. As I was about to leave, I caught the smell of something burning. I turned. The stove light was still on. I got a couple of hot pads and opened the oven door, wincing at the blast of heat.

  I was not exactly steady on my feet, but I managed to set the casserole on the counter and take off the glass top. Aromas rose, peppery and succulent. There was some crispiness around the edges, but except for that, it was perfect. Tomatoes still bubbled away. I turned off the stove and tugged a dangly piece of lamb out of the stew. I juggled it from hand to hand for several seconds to let it cool.

  I turned my head sideways, took a couple of quick nips, then tore the meat in two with my teeth. The room still swayed like a ship in a storm. I wiped my hands on a towel so I wouldn’t get the envelope greasy, picked up the packet of letters and documents, and let myself out the back door.

  When I got home, I fixed myself a strong pot of coffee and sat down with my packet of info. There was a bunch of letters, held together by rubber bands and paper clips, between Rex and the detective agency, that I hadn’t had time to go over at Dranka’s.

  It sounded as if everybody was getting pissed at everybody. Rex was making noises about firing the whole lot of them. He’d paid them lavishly for two years and he wanted results. The head of the agency shot back that they were doing the best they could. They had assigned their finest investigators to the case, but they had warned Rex in the beginning that this would not be an easy one to crack. The trail was several decades old, records were destroyed or lost, and many of the people they would have wanted to interview were dead.

  Our investigator tells me that the last time the two of you spoke, you mentioned that you once visited the boy in one of his foster homes. That is a piece of information that never came up in any of our previous conversations, and seems so unlikely I assume he’s gotten it wrong.

  Is it true? And if it is true, would you please give us all the details of that visit? Where it took place and when? Just put down everything you remember, whether it feels relevant or not.

  I don’t mean to chide you, Mr. Schoeninger, but this is just the sort of thing we should have known from the get-go. We pride ourselves here at the agency on leaving no stone unturned, but we will not be able to succeed without your fullest cooperation.

  The letter Rex sent back was three pages long, single-spaced, and huffy.

  I must say I don’t think there’s any reason for anyone to get his nose out of joint. It is true, I did see the boy at one of his foster homes. His first one, in fact, after the judge had removed him from the care of my ex-wife.

  The judge and I had come to the painful decision that the child should be once again placed for adoption. I asked if I could see him one last time. It was highly irregular, of course, but things were different in those days, and the judge was able to arrange it.

  I imagine that this would be the first week in March, 1953. Daniel was staying in a home on the outskirts of Bridgeport. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the woman’s name, but it was something Irish. McManus. McMurphy. I believe it was Locust Street. A two-story clapboard house. The woman was one of those anxious types, with big bunny slippers. She had two kids of her own and three foster kids. Plus cats. Place stank of kitty litter. Lots of trikes and dead plants in the yard.

  The boy was taking a nap, but the woman said I could go in and see him. There were a couple of bunkbeds and the kid was asleep in one of the bottom ones. I took a little chair and sat next to him. Clothes were scattered on the floor everywhere. Tucked under his arm was this carved wooden buffalo with a broken horn that I’d brought back from my trip to Wyoming. It seemed like a miracle that he still had it, after all the bouncing around he’d been doing.

  So much of what I remembered was him crying, so it was quite something to see him sleeping peacefully like that. His neck and arms were still red from where he’d been burned. He’d grown a lot in a year. Lost almost all of his baby fat.

  I finally touched his face. I don’t know that he even woke all the way up, but he opened his eyes and smiled. “Daddy,” he said, “Daddy.” I held my hand out to him and he took my thumb. It was something he’d always done when I was putting him to bed. He’d grab my thumb and hold on so I couldn’t sneak away. We were like that for a couple of minutes, him looking at me, me looking at him, and then he went back to sleep. After a little while I could feel his grip relaxing and then his hand just fell away. I got up and tiptoed out of the room. Shut the door without making a sound.

  The woman was feeding her cats. We may have talked for ten minutes. She knew of my books. She weaseled fifty dollars out of me to get a nice little sailor suit for the kid. She wanted me to know what an exceptional boy he was, so intelligent, you could see it in his eyes. She kept telling me how I didn’t need to worry, she treated her foster kids just like her own. She may not have a lot of money, she said, but she knew how to create a happy home.

  I remember going out to my car, walking across the yard. It was March and it was miserable. I got all this crap on my shoes. I found a stick and must have sat in my car for five minutes, scraping the mud off.

  Other
details? She had a heavy Boston accent. Her husband worked for the railroad. I defy you to tell me what use any of this could be to anyone, but there it is.

  I got up to wander the house. I was going nuts. Did Rex still think he was going to find a kid after forty years? This was total fairy-tale stuff.

  It took a while for it all to sink in, just how outrageous it was. On the one hand, it was just what I’d been looking for. This was good enough to ruin anybody.

  At the same time, it struck a little too close to home. How could an orphan turn away an orphan? How could anyone turn away an orphan? You adopt a kid, he’s adopted. You don’t get to take him back to the grocery like he’s a rotten chicken.

  Crazy shit was going through my head; maybe it was just that combination of slivovitz and strong coffee. What if I was Schoeninger’s adopted son and all the money was legitimately mine and I didn’t even have to con him out of it? Wouldn’t that have been a kicker? Could I possibly have been adopted and given back? I’d bounced in and out of so many foster homes, everything ran together.

  Most of the places had been real dumps—the basement apartment where I’d lived with the Cuban building superintendent and his wife, the second-floor walk-up on Delancy Street with the fat woman who sat watching soap operas all day long with a switch in her lap that she would use on any of us kids who got too close, the place in Brooklyn where wild dogs ran up and down the hallway and the water in the kitchen sink would never turned off, just gushed, hour after hour.

  There was no way I was Schoeninger’s kid, but if I had been, think about how differently everything would have turned out. I would have spent a lot of time with babysitters when he was off researching his books, but when I got older, he most likely would have taken me along sometimes, and I would have met warlords and Catholic cardinals and learned how to shoot elephants. Knowing him, he probably would have been strict. I doubt that he would have given me much of an allowance, but all the same, I would have known all that money was there, waiting. I would have been a popular kid, but I would have never been quite sure whether people liked me for myself or because I had such a famous father. I would have turned out to have been a good citizen, the sort of rich guy people are always trying to get to serve on muckety-muck boards, instead of this selfish little menace to society.

  As I was pouring the last of the coffee down the drain, there was a knock at the door. I froze. Could it be Dranka? Her stuff was everywhere, laid out on the table in the living room, on the chairs, strewn on the floor.

  The second knock was louder than the first. I set the coffeepot down noiselessly in the sink, praying it was just a magazine salesman, some poor schmuck working his way through college, and not a vengeful Yugoslavian cook armed with a kitchen knife. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with her junk, but I knew I could come up with something a lot better than selling it to Oprah.

  I stood there for another minute before I heard a dull thump at the door and the sound of retreating footsteps. I gave it a little more time, just to be sure, then went to the curtains in the hall and peered out. The sidewalk was empty, and in the street no one but a five-year-old wobbling to and fro on his bike, his father trotting along behind, shouting instructions.

  I opened the front door. On the stoop was another large manila envelope. Jesus Christ, I thought, the last thing I need right now is more information. But when I opened it and pulled out the sheaf of papers, I saw it was just muddy xeroxes of Mel’s summer journal.

  I can’t tell you how relieved I felt! I stuffed everything back in the envelope and gave it a heave-ho onto the sofa. One of the great things about student work, you can always put it off until later.

  Chapter Eleven

  I’d never dug a grave before. It’s more work than you think. Rex had picked out the spot, under the magnolia tree in the far corner of the backyard. It took Ramona and me a good half hour, taking turns with a shovel and a pickax.

  It hadn’t rained for a couple of months and the ground was hard, but what made it really tough was the limestone that seemed to be everywhere, just a few inches below the surface.

  We hacked and chipped away, digging down a couple of feet, but the question was, how deep was deep enough? The last thing you wanted was some raccoon coming along and clawing everything up.

  Rex, a St. Louis Cardinals cap shading his eyes, stood watching as I got down on my knees to pull out some of the snaky tree roots. I yanked and tugged, the roots making little popping sounds as they gave. As dry as it was, once you got down far enough, the earth still had that musky rotten-leaf smell to it. I tossed three or four broken limestone slabs onto the lawn and sat back on my haunches to rest.

  “How does that look?” I said.

  “That should be fine,” Rex said.

  I pushed to my feet, wet shirt clinging to my back. Rex nodded to Ramona, who put down the pickax, crossed the yard, head bowed, and ducked into the half basement under the house.

  I patted Rex on the elbow. “You doing all right?” I said.

  “I’m doing okay.”

  On the far side of the fence a mockingbird, wings flailing, attacked the side mirror of the neighbor’s car. I pinched the corners of my eyes. I was tired, and not exactly in a sweetheart of a mood. I’d been awake half the night, thinking about how Rex had shafted that poor kid. And now we were supposed to feel sorry for him because his dog died, a nasty little mutt that was nothing but trouble? Give me a break.

  As Ramona emerged from the basement, Rex raised a hand to his mouth and then let it drop. She had Mingo in her arms, wrapped in a white towel. It was not the moment to ask, but it made me wonder if they’d been keeping him in the freezer. She moved slowly across the lawn, like a bride coming down the aisle. I leaned over to roll the wheelbarrow out of the way.

  She stopped in front of Rex and pulled back the towel so he could have a look. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Rex running a hand over the dog’s curly coat, scratching him gently behind the ears.

  The body was still stiff with rigor mortis, legs sticking out like the legs of a Thanksgiving turkey. I don’t know if it was Ramona or not, but someone had cleaned him up pretty good. The head was turned away from me, so I really couldn’t see, but it didn’t look mashed, so much as weirdly twisted, jaws frozen open, teeth bared.

  Ramona turned to me so I could make my farewells, but I shook my head no. She knelt down and laid the scrawny little body in the bottom of the hole.

  She struggled to her feet and brushed off her hands. We just stood there. It must have been for two minutes. Over in the next yard, the mockingbird rat-tat-tatted at the mirror, crapping all over the side of the car. It would have been nice to have had a little prayer, or a song to sing, or even, God help me, a poem. Anything would have been better than just standing there, staring down at that crumpled mess laid out on a white bath towel.

  Ramona finally bent to retrieve the shovel. She handed it to Rex. He stabbed it several times into one of the piles of dirt until he had a goodly amount, then hefted it, let the loose soil trickle down into the shallow grave.

  Ramona reached out to take the shovel from him, but he wasn’t done. He raked together a second spadeful and a third, and rained them down on the body of his dead pet.

  He was not a great shoveler. He was old and not strong. He spilled about half of every load before he got it to the grave, and sometimes, swinging the curved blade into the dirt piles, he would miss altogether and nearly fall. His St. Louis Cardinals cap was all cockeyed. I was starting to worry about him pitching into the hole, but he finally flipped the shovel away. As he turned to stride back to the house, I could see tears glistening on his cheeks.

  Ramona went after him and caught him by the wrist. She put her arm around him, comforting him as they made their way across the deck and into the back hallway.

  I rubbed at my face, trying to figure out what to do. Part of me would have been perfectly happy to walk away and leave it all, but that didn’t seem right.
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  I picked up the shovel and got to work. There’s something spooky about burying things, something that makes you feel bad, but I kept lobbing dirt in there and slowly the dog began to disappear. From time to time I’d stop to nurse the twinge in my back. I was not a man used to physical labor.

  It had been a hell of a thing, seeing Rex turn on the old waterworks. But knowing him, I’ll bet he wasn’t even crying for the dog. He probably was just crying for himself. He had to know it wasn’t long before he was going to be down in a hole like that.

  The mockingbird had given up attacking the mirror and was flitting from tree to tree. I heaved a heaping spadeful onto Mingo’s head, finally obliterating it. Only a paw remained visible. Rex was going to be awfully lonely without that dog. One thing you had to say about Mingo, he never wanted anything from Rex except an occasional scratch on the belly.

  I got the wheelbarrow, filled it with the rest of the dirt, and pushed it to the edge of the grave. When I tipped it up, the dirt slid out in one raspy rush. I tamped the soil down with the flat of the shovel and then stomped around a bit, sealing everything tight.

  A cat crept across the backyard. When I turned, it stopped to stare at me with huge yellow eyes. All I could think was, if Mingo was alive, he would have had that cat up a tree before you could say spit.

  When I got home there was a message from Dranka on my answering machine. “Please call me. I need to get my letters back. I speak to my friend this morning and she give me name of lawyer. I will be here all day.”

  I set the phone back on the receiver. This did not sound good. My hope had been that I would have been able to put her off for a few days until I came up with a plan, but it looked as if I could bid sayonara to that idea.

  I called her right back. I tried to strike an amiable tone, joke around a little, but she was in no mood for small talk. Now that she was sober and had a good night’s sleep under her belt, she was loaded for bear. She was over being afraid. If Rex wanted to have her arrested, let him try. He had nothing on her compared to what she had on him. It was time for the world to see just what sort of man he really was.